Forgot these ugly limits for BIOS, DOS, FAT16 ... had to re-install a Siemens PCD-4ND

Saturday, November 24, 2012, 11:00 PMPosted by Administrator

Yes, I am getting old. I forgot these days with ugly limits for harddisk access.Not only logical limits (like FAT16 vs FAT32), also hardware limits.I have selled my Compaq Portable II last week, which was my floppy disk format conversion station (e.g. with such programs like Uniform, or 22Disk ...).Now I took my PCD-4ND notebook, a very beautiful Intel 486 based old computer, which had a 500MB harddisk - way too small:So I decided to exchange this 500MB IBM HDD with a newer Fujitsu 6.4GB HDD.Guess what happened... I noticed a strange error message from my Windows 95 Setup, something like "harddisk size parameters are wrong, no LBA support".I was a bit surprised because that Siemens PCD-4ND already had LBA support integrated in its Phoenix BIOS 1.03 from 1997.But this LBA support was not really working, a Western Digital Tool "DSKCHK" reported EXT INT13h Support is *NOT* supported by this most current available BIOS.I tried Paragon Disk Manager 5.5, and tried to "fix" this wrong MBR / disk partition table.It showed now 2GB free, but it still was not fixed for the Windows 95 Setup.

Without success I remembered there was a time special drivers were offered from Seagate or Maxtor (= Seagate Disk Manager or Maxblast).It was a bit difficult to find an appropriate version of these tools, but after I formatted and installedDisk Manager 9, it worked surprisingly without errors.

Think about how easy it is, to install new hardware and operating systems nowadays...